Google has announced that its Google Home connected speaker will launch in the UK on April 6, along with the Google Wifi router.
Google has announced that its Google Home connected speaker will launch in the UK on April 6, along with the Google Wifi router.
The Google Home connected speaker, which started shipping in the US back in November , is seeking to compete with the likes of Amazon’s Echo (which launched in the UK last fall ) — offering a physical housing for Google’s voice assistant tech, the eponymous Google Assistant, to position its listening ear perpetually inside your home.
The company mocked up a fake house in London this morning to demo the device to journalists. Which may or may not be a fitting metaphor for the extensively hyped concept of the ‘smart home’.
But for those Brits who dream of sitting on an impossibly white leather couch, next to Google’s always listening microphone primed and ready to tell you what the weather is tomorrow, or add something to your to-do list, or inform you where the nearest petrol station is and how to get there then today is a special day indeed.
Unlike the Amazon Echo, Google Home does not have such a sprawling ecommerce back-end to plug into — and while Google Home offers some limited ecommerce options in the US , it does not appear to be bringing any such services to the UK as yet.
Given its head-start with the tech, the Echo has also amassed considerably more third party app integrations — such as services like JustEat and Uber.
